Newsbits: PostgreSQL updates and betas all round

These are the database and developer news bits for the week ending September 1st brought to you by Compose. In this edition:

Updates for production PostgreSQL.

Fresh beta for PostgreSQL 10.

More accessibility in Kibana with Elasticsearch 6 Beta 2.

MongoDB turns the lights off on Solaris.

KSQL is like SQL for Kafka.

etcd also gets a two small updates.

Rust turns 1.20.

Update your RubyGems!

And finally, what would you do with an 80s toy.

Here are the NewsBits:

Database Bits

PostgreSQL Updated - Early August's PostgreSQL update to 9.6.4, 9.5.8, 9.4.13 etc was predominantly a security update, but the Late August update, to 9.6.5, 9.5.9, 9.4.15 et al is more tidying up the versions for assorted bugs. Top of the list, a fix for a crash in pg_restore in parallel mode. The release notes for 9.6.5 tell the rest of the story in detail.

PostgreSQL 10 Progress - There's also an update for the oncoming PostgreSQL 10 with beta 4 being released. All the fixes from the 9.6 update above are applied amongst the various other Postgres 10 fixes. If you want to get a feel for the progress, check out the 10 Open Items page and, yes that does say they are currently expecting release candidates and a release this month.

MongoDB sunsets Solaris - MongoDB has announced that theyb are ending support for Solaris for future versions of MongoDB. This isn't unexpected, with Oracle pulling Solaris back in-house, balkanization of open source variants of Solaris and exceptionally low usage. MongoDB says they'll continue supporting security and critical issues for 3.4 and prior versions.

Kafka goes SQL - The distributed streaming platform that is Kafka now has an SQL-like option for working with its streams of logs, events or transactions: KSQL. Confluent announced KSQL as an open-sourced alternative to writing applications to work with streams so you can do "continuous queries" on the data as it passes through. KSQL is available as a developer preview on Github at the moment.

etcd - Another small update from the etcd team landed in etcd 3.2.6 with fixes for restoring watches from snapshots and fixes for listening for peers on multiple URLs. Update: Just as we published, etcd 3.2.7 was released which includes a number of fixes around concurrency consistency.

Developer Bits

Rust 1.20 - The latest version of Rust is 1.20. It adds the ability to associate constants with structs, traits, and types in addition to the existing associated functions. Interestingly, associated constants were part of RFC 195 which outlined these associations three years ago. Although Rust is developing rapidly, it's being done with a lot of consideration for each step.

RubyGems updates - You may want to freshen up your RubyGems after a number of security flaws were found in the packages including vulnerabilities to DNS hijacking and denial of service.

And Finally

Looking for inspiration for that home project or staring at a Raspberry Pi looking for ideas? Check out this Tomy Turnin' Dashboard Outrun Arcade project which sees a barely functional toy turned into a Pi based arcade machine running a classic arcade game - now with working steering wheel and gears.

NewsBits. News in bits, every Friday at Compose.

Dj Walker-Morgan is Compose's resident Content Curator, and has been both a developer and writer since Apples came in II flavors and Commodores had Pets. Love this article? Head over to Dj Walker-Morgan’s author page to keep reading.